Heck is a project that was born out of a local Minneapolis-St. Paul project called the 144-hour Graphic Novel Project. Each 12-page chapter would be produced in a single 12-hour session, for a year, which would culminated in a decent-sized graphic novel without significantly impacting one’s free time. Naturally this project collapsed for all involved, myself included, when the reality of burning a whole Saturday once a month started to impede on our spouses, children, and more interesting weekend plans.

By that time, however, this project had grown to the point where I could not abandon it. The concept was plucked out of a shuffle of old mid-quality ideas as a modest pulp adventure, but as I wrote and drew it (simultaneously, in most cases, and very fast), the characters by necessity came to life and started to possess dimensions that I hadn’t planned on. The various forces that were shaping my mid-thirties horned their way in and made the relationship between a man with a shotgun and his tiny mummy sidekick the representation of a lot of my own thoughts about fatherhood, responsibility, guilt, and heartbreak.